David Grossman - A Horse Walks Into a Bar

The audience, which has been increasingly subdued for the past few minutes, is now completely still. The faces are devoid of expression. Wary of committing. Maybe that’s how I look from the stage, too.

“Where were we? No, don’t tell me! Me do it on my own! You know what the opposite of forgetting is at my age?”

A few feeble voices: “Remembering?”

“No: writing down. Okay, so soldier, officer, ass, train, embroidery…Right, so I’m behind her, walking slowly, getting even slower, wondering what it could be, it must be a mistake, why would they send me to a funeral? Why didn’t they pick some other kid?”

He talks fast, holding back an outburst. His hands dig deeper and deeper into his armpits. I think he’s trembling a little.

“So I walk and I chew over the thoughts slowly, then even more slowly, and I don’t get it, I just don’t get it, and all of a sudden I flip over and turn upside down and walk on my hands. I walk behind her, the sand’s hot as hell, it burns my hands, doesn’t matter, burning is good, burning is not thinking, things fall out of my pocket, change, phone tokens, gum, stuff Dad shoved in there for the road, little surprises, he always did that, especially after he hit me, never mind. I walk quickly, I run”—he holds his hands up over his head and walks them through the air, and I can see they really are shaking, the fingers trembling—“who’s gonna find me when I’m upside down? How can anyone catch me?”

Deathly silence. It seems to me that people are trying to understand how—with what sleight of hand, through what trickery or magic—they’ve been transported from the place they were in a few moments ago to this new story.

I feel the same way. Like the ground is dropping away from under my feet.

“And this girl, the soldier, she suddenly sensed something, maybe she saw my shadow upside down on the ground, and she turned around, I saw her shadow spinning. ‘Are you out of your mind?’ she yelled, but she was sort of yelling quietly. ‘Cadet, back on your feet this instant! Are you mad? Playing around at a time like this?’ But me? I just run around next to her, in front of her, behind her, my hands burn, they get pricked by thorns, stones, gravel, but I don’t flip back up. What’s she going to do to me? You can’t do anything to me when I’m like that, and there’s no thoughts that way, my head is full of blood, ears plugged, no brain, no one to think, no What the hell she’s not allowed to yell at me, no What does she mean ‘at a time like this’? ”

He walks very slowly, his hands still up in the air, step after step after step, and the tip of his tongue sticks out between his lips. The big copper urn behind him traps his body, sucks it into its curves, and divides it into waves until he extricates himself.

“And by the way, I can see my pals, too, upside down, sitting right where I left them, listening to the instructor, learning about camouflage, which is a good skill to have in life, not even turning their heads to see what’s up with me—remember the Shoelace Gauge? I see them getting farther and farther away, and I know it’s me getting farther away, but bottom line: me and them are far apart.”

—

Liora, the girl from my class who was on guard duty with me at the north post the night before, I had loved passionately for almost two years and had never had the guts to talk to. Dovaleh knew I was in love with her. He was the only one in the world I’d told about her. The only one who knew to ask me about her, and to really extract from me, with his piercing Socratic questions, the understanding that I loved her. That this emotion that tortured me in her presence—and made me even more gloomy and aggressive—was love. When we were on guard duty together that night, at 3:00 a.m., I kissed Liora. I touched a girl’s body for the first time. My years of loneliness were over, and, one could say, my new life had begun.

And he was with me there. I mean, I talked to her the way I talked with him. The way he taught me in our walkie-talkie conversations. And I had learned well: as soon as we got to the guard post, I asked her about her parents, and where they’d met, and then about her two brothers. She was amazed. It knocked her off-balance. I needled her patiently but stubbornly, and slyly, until she gradually told me about her older brother, who was autistic and lived in an institution and was almost never spoken of at home. I had been a star pupil and I was prepared for the encounter: I knew how to ask and I knew how to listen. Liora talked and cried, and talked and cried some more, and when I made her laugh she laughed through her tears, and I stroked her and hugged her and kissed her tears away. There was a spuriousness on my part that, to this day, I have trouble understanding completely. Some sort of skeleton-key trickery. I felt that I was aiming myself to the Dovaleh I knew, the beloved old Dovaleh. I was reviving him from inside myself for the benefit of this moment with Liora, letting his words flow out of my throat. And I was levelheaded enough to know that afterward I would once again erase him.

That morning, when I sat on the sandy quad with my platoon and the sergeant came for him, I was drunk. Drunk on love and a sense of redemption and lack of sleep. I saw him get up and follow her, and I didn’t even wonder where he was going. Then I must have sunk back into fantasizing about Liora and the unbelievably soft texture of her lips and her breasts and the tufts of down in her armpits, and when I looked again I saw him walking behind the sergeant on his hands. I’d never seen him do that before and it had never occurred to me that he was capable of it. He walked fast, light, and because of the intense heat that roiled the air, his body seemed to radiate ripples. It was a wondrous spectacle. He suddenly looked free and cheerful, prancing on waves of air as if he were defeating the laws of gravity and becoming his own self again. My affection for him washed over me, and the torture of the last few days was wiped away.

For one moment.

But I couldn’t tolerate it. Him. His ups and downs. I looked away from him. I remember the movement clearly. And I sank back into my new intoxication.

“So we keep running, her upright and me the other way, with thistles and sand and signs running in front of my eyes, and we get to the path with white stones that leads to the commander’s barracks, and I can hear yelling from inside: ‘You’re taking him right now!’ ‘Fuck if I’m going all the way there!’ ‘You get him to the funeral by four, that’s an order!’ ‘I’ve been back and forth to Jerusalem three times already this week!’ Then I hear someone else, and I recognize the voice immediately: it’s the drill sergeant, the one we called Eichmann—that was the nickname of choice back then for the compassionately challenged—and he’s yelling, too, and his voice is louder than all the others: ‘But where the hell is he? Where’s the orphan kid? ’ ”

He grins apologetically. His arms hang beside his body.

I stare at the table. At my hands. I didn’t know.

“My hands turn to butter. I fall over and lie with my head on the ground. And I lie there and lie there for I don’t know how long. And when I manage to lift my head, I see that I’m alone. Are you getting the picture? Yours truly splattered all over the desert sand, the sergeant chick is long gone, she took off, that chubby cheeks, that sweet little mitzvah tank, I guarantee you that girl did not have a poster of Oskar Schindler hanging over her bed.”

I didn’t know. It never occurred to me. How could I have known?

“Come on now, Netanya honey, stay with me. I need you to hold my hand. So in front of me are these kind of wooden steps leading up to the commander’s barracks, above me blazing sun and eagles, all around me seven bloodthirsty Arab states, and inside they’re yelling at each other like madmen: ‘I’m only taking him as far as Be’er Sheva! Someone from the command will have to take him from there to Jerusalem!’ ‘Okay, okay, you dumbass, I heard you, just take the kid already and go, we don’t have time for this. Go, I’m telling you!’ ”